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ThoughtWorks director Neal Ford argued in a recent talk that organizations transition more easily from a monolithic architecture to a service-based architecture than to a microservices architecture. Ford spoke at UberConf 2016 about service-based architecture, a middle ground between service-oriented architecture and microservices.

Continuous delivery should be treated as an agile project as it is about automating your deployment. You have to speed up in small steps and gain trust by doing small deliveries and solve problems fast. The story about how Klaverblad insurance has implemented Agile, DevOps, continuous delivery, and microservices.

Confluent Enterprise latest version supports multi-datacenter replication, automatic data balancing, and cloud migration capability. Confluent, provider of the Apache Kafka based streaming platform, announced last week the new features for Confluent Enterprise, to help build streaming data pipelines and develop stream processing applications.

Rags Srinivas caught up with engineering manager at Netflix, Mikey Cohen, regarding their major re-architecture of their Zuul gateway for microservices. Cohen talks about the journey and walks through the motivation and challenges of this significant effort.

Zeppelin is a MIT licensed open source secure smart contract development framework to build blockchain applications. It's a community effort pioneered to ensure only secure, tested and audited smart contract code makes it to a production blockchain, to reduce incidents such as "The DAO" hack. Zeppelin is intended to be blockchain-agnostic, but in the beginning they are focusing on Solidity tools.

At the Agile on the Beach 2016 conference, held in Cornwall, UK, Rebecca Parsons argued that the requirements for improved time-to-market and increased business agility can be achieved by architecting software for real evolvability, keeping systems poised for change, lowering the cost (and risk) of experimentation, maximising visibility and feedback, and aligning the organisation.

Scalability should be considered when developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP needs to be technically scalable and you need to have a plan on how to scale quickly when your MVP attracts many users and becomes successful. Knowing your possible performance bottlenecks and using common sense while developing your MVP will get you very far, says Erik Duindam, CTO at Unboxd.

On 22nd September, the MicroProfile group held a panel event in San Francisco to discuss the current and future situation. Albeit not being part of JavaOne, the fact that it coincided in time and city made it easy for conference-goers to attend. The panel included representatives from RedHat, Payara, SouJava, Tomitribe, IBM, and the LJC, and speculated about the shape of future Java development.

Microsoft announced the first release of Project Bletchley, which is Microsoft's approach to building a cloud-based enterprise consortium blockchain ecosystem. This first release is primarily focused on a questionnaire based automated deployment along with roadmap details for the Cryptlet middleware tier.

Refactoring helps to move towards cleaner code that is easier to understand and maintain. It takes practice and experience to recognise code smells: symptoms of bad design which indicate deeper problems in the code. Tools can be helpful to refactor in small steps and prevent breaking the code.

People stopped seeing the need to define the architecture or do software design due to incorrect interpretation of the agile manifesto, argued Simon Brown. Many software developers don’t seem to have a sufficient toolbox of practices and the software industry lacks a common vocabulary for architecture. A good architecture enables agility with just enough up front design to create firm foundations.

Moving towards microservices means moving towards distributed systems where you have to deal with latency, authorization and authentication, and messages that do not arrive, argues Sander Hoogendoorn. With microservices you can break down large systems into smaller components to regain control over the architecture.

Almost five years in the making, Dropwizard's Java RESTful Web Service framework version 1.0.0 offers a host of new features including Java 8, Http/2 and Scala support, and the latest versions of supporting Java APIs.